Bluesky & Mastodon Keyword Monitor: Mentions & Alerts

Try it free: Apify's free plan includes monthly platform credit, no credit card needed. One example run with the input below costs about $0.02 ($0.002 per run + up to 20 mentions at $0.001 each (at most $0.022)).

{
  "keywords": [
    "apify"
  ],
  "platforms": [
    "bluesky",
    "mastodon"
  ],
  "lookbackHours": 24,
  "maxResults": 20
}

Paste this into the JSON tab of the input form and click Start.

Find new public Bluesky and Mastodon posts that mention your brand, product, project, name or topic. Put it on a schedule and every run returns only the posts you have not seen yet. Results come as a table, an Excel file, a CSV and a short text digest you can forward by email or Slack.

No login, no API key and no account on Bluesky or Mastodon needed. The Actor only reads public posts and respects the opt-outs people have set.

Who it is for

• Marketing and PR teams who want to see what people say about their brand
• Founders and indie developers watching mentions of their product or open-source project
• DevRel and community managers who need to answer questions quickly
• Journalists and researchers following a topic, a company or a public debate

What you get for each post

Field	Example
platform	bluesky or mastodon
postedAt	2026-10-09T10:12:00Z
matchedKeywords	["apify"]
text	"New tutorial: Apify, step by step..."
url	link to the original post
authorName / authorHandle / authorProfileUrl	who posted it, as shown publicly on the post
likes / reposts / replies	counts at the time of the run
isReply	true if the post is a reply
language	language tag set by the author, if any
links / hashtags	links and hashtags in the post
foundBy	which search found it, for example bluesky search: apify or mastodon mastodon.social: #apify
firstSeenAt	when this Actor first delivered the post

Every run also writes these files to the run's key-value store:

• mentions.xlsx: Excel with filters, frozen header and clickable links
• mentions.csv: UTF-8 with BOM, comma or semicolon (semicolon for Excel in Germany, Austria and Switzerland)
• digest.txt: a plain-text list, ready to send with an Apify email or Slack integration
• RUN_SUMMARY: what was searched, how many posts were scanned, skipped as duplicates, filtered out (and why) and delivered, plus any Mastodon servers that were skipped

Quick start

1. Enter your keywords, for example apify, "web scraping", #opensource, example.com.
2. Keep both platforms selected and click Start.
3. To get alerts: create a Schedule (for example every hour with Look back = 3 hours, or daily with 30 hours) and add an email or Slack integration that sends digest.txt. With Only new mentions on (the default), each run delivers only posts that earlier runs have not delivered.

Example input:

{
  "keywords": ["apify", "\"web scraping\"", "#opensource"],
  "excludeKeywords": ["job ad"],
  "platforms": ["bluesky", "mastodon"],
  "languages": ["en", "de"],
  "lookbackHours": 24,
  "onlyNew": true,
  "monitorName": "my-brand"
}

How keywords match

• Words and phrases are case-insensitive and match whole words: open source finds "Open Source" but not "opensourced".
• Any language and script works: Latin with accents, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai. Text is Unicode-normalised first, so full-width letters (Ａｐｉｆｙ) and straße/STRASSE match too.
• Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Thai and similar scripts have no spaces between words, so keywords in those scripts match anywhere in the text (東京 finds "東京で"). Latin keywords also match next to those scripts: ChatGPT finds "ChatGPTで翻訳".
• Ignore accents (on by default): eleicao finds "eleição", cafe finds "café", Muller finds "Müller". Japanese voiced marks are not touched. Turn it off if accents change the meaning of your keywords.
• Start with # to look for a hashtag: #python matches the hashtag, not the plain word.
• Anything with other characters, like example.com or @handle, matches anywhere in the text or in the post's links.
• A post is only returned if a keyword appears in its text (or links/hashtags). Search engines sometimes return posts because a keyword appears only in the author's handle or in a link preview. Those posts are dropped and counted as noKeywordInText in RUN_SUMMARY.
• Exclude keywords drop a post if any of them appear.

Where the data comes from

• Bluesky: the public search endpoint of the Bluesky AppView (app.bsky.feed.searchPosts on api.bsky.app), sorted by newest. Bluesky allows logged-out search for the first page only (up to 100 posts per keyword and run), and this Actor does not try to page beyond that. If a keyword gets more than 100 posts in your look-back window, run more often with a shorter window.
• Mastodon: public hashtag timelines (/api/v1/timelines/tag/<tag>) of the servers you choose (default: mastodon.social, fosstodon.org, hachyderm.io). Mastodon has no public full-text search for logged-out visitors, so the Actor reads the hashtag timelines that belong to your keywords (or the hashtags you list) and then checks the post text for your keywords. A server sees its own users' posts plus the posts it has received from other servers, so no list of servers covers the whole fediverse.
• Post content belongs to its authors. Please link to the original post when you quote it.

Respect for opt-outs and server rules

• Bluesky: posts are skipped if the author or the post carries the label !no-unauthenticated (the author asked not to be shown to logged-out viewers), or the moderation labels !hide or !takedown.
• Mastodon: only posts with visibility public. The author must have opted in to search (indexable, or discoverable on older servers). Posts are skipped if the account is marked noindex or has #nobot, #noindex, #nosearch or #noarchive in its bio. Boosts are skipped.
• Before reading a Mastodon server, the Actor reads that server's rules and, where available, its terms of service. If they forbid scraping, crawling, harvesting, data mining or archiving, the server is skipped and named in RUN_SUMMARY. Servers that close hashtag timelines to logged-out visitors are skipped too.
• Read-only: the Actor never posts, likes, follows or sends messages. It identifies itself with an honest user agent, spaces its requests and waits when a server asks it to slow down (HTTP 429 / Retry-After).
• Skipped posts are counted as optedOut in RUN_SUMMARY.

Pricing

Pay per event. See the Pricing tab for current prices. You pay a small fee per run plus a fee per delivered mention. With Only new mentions on, runs that find nothing new only cost the run fee. Maximum results and Apify's Maximum cost per run cap what a run can cost. The run stops cleanly when your limit is reached.

Limits

• Bluesky: up to 100 newest posts per keyword per run (logged-out search has no paging). Very busy keywords need frequent runs.
• Mastodon: only hashtag timelines, up to 120 posts per hashtag and server per run, at most 5 servers and 10 hashtags. Posts that mention your keyword without the hashtag are only found on Bluesky.
• Up to 20 keywords per run and a look-back of at most 7 days. For more keywords, use several tasks.
• Like, repost and reply counts are a snapshot at run time.
• Edited or deleted posts are not updated or removed from earlier results. If you keep results, delete posts that their authors have deleted.
• Bluesky or a Mastodon server can change or restrict their public APIs at any time. If a source cannot be read, the run says so in its status and in RUN_SUMMARY instead of silently returning less.

Data protection

The results contain public posts and the public name and handle of their authors, nothing more (no follower lists, bios, e-mail addresses or profile pictures). If you are in the EU, you are the controller for what you do with them under the GDPR: use them for a legitimate purpose like brand or media monitoring, keep them only as long as you need them and honour deletion requests.

Integrations and API

Use the Apify API, scheduled tasks, webhooks or integrations (Slack, email, Google Sheets, Make, Zapier, n8n) to send new mentions where you work. The dataset view "Mentions" shows the most useful columns. The full items contain every field listed above.

FAQ

Do I need a Bluesky or Mastodon account? No.

Why did a post I can see in the Bluesky app not show up? It may be older than your look-back window, beyond the first 100 search results, from an author who opted out of logged-out visibility, or the keyword appears only in the handle or link preview.

Can I monitor a person? The Actor matches keywords in post text. It is not built for tracking individuals, and you must have a legitimate reason under data-protection law for whatever you monitor.

Does it work in languages other than English? Yes. We tested it with Japanese (ChatGPT, 東京) and Brazilian Portuguese (eleicao, Lula) keywords. Use the Languages filter with two-letter codes like ja, pt, es, de (pt-BR also works). The language tag comes from the author's app and is sometimes missing or wrong. Posts without one are kept. For Mastodon, add servers where your language is spoken, for example mstdn.jp or fedibird.com (Japanese), mastodon.com.br (Portuguese), masto.es (Spanish), mastodon.uno (Italian), piaille.fr (French), social.tchncs.de or norden.social (German).

Why does Bluesky return more than Mastodon? Bluesky has a public full-text search. Mastodon only lets logged-out visitors read hashtag timelines, so posts that contain your keyword without the hashtag are only found on Bluesky.

Other languages

The English text above is the full documentation. These short summaries are for getting started in your language.

日本語

このActorは、BlueskyとMastodonの公開投稿から、指定したキーワード（ブランド名、製品名、話題など）を含む新しい投稿を集めます。日本語のキーワードは単語の区切りがなくても文中で見つかり、「ChatGPTで」のように英字と日本語が続く場合も検出します。言語フィルターに ja を指定すると日本語の投稿だけに絞れます。Mastodonでは、日本語の利用者が多いサーバー（例: mstdn.jp、fedibird.com）を追加してください。ログインやAPIキーは不要で、公開範囲を制限した投稿や検索を拒否しているユーザーの投稿は取得しません。

{
  "keywords": ["ChatGPT", "東京"],
  "languages": ["ja"],
  "mastodonInstances": ["mstdn.jp", "fedibird.com", "mastodon.social"],
  "lookbackHours": 24
}

Em português (Brasil)

Este Actor encontra posts públicos novos no Bluesky e no Mastodon que mencionam a sua marca, produto ou tema. As palavras-chave funcionam com ou sem acento: "eleicao" também encontra "eleição". Use o filtro de idioma pt para receber só posts em português e adicione servidores brasileiros do Mastodon, como mastodon.com.br. Não é preciso login nem chave de API, e posts de autores que pediram para não aparecer em buscas são ignorados.

{
  "keywords": ["eleicao", "sua marca"],
  "languages": ["pt"],
  "mastodonInstances": ["mastodon.com.br", "mastodon.social"],
  "lookbackHours": 24
}

En español

Este Actor busca publicaciones públicas nuevas en Bluesky y Mastodon que mencionan tu marca, producto o tema. Las palabras clave funcionan con o sin tildes: "cafe" también encuentra "café". Usa el filtro de idioma es para recibir solo publicaciones en español y añade servidores de Mastodon en español, como masto.es. No necesitas iniciar sesión ni clave de API, y se omiten las publicaciones de autores que no quieren aparecer en búsquedas.

{
  "keywords": ["cafe", "tu marca"],
  "languages": ["es"],
  "mastodonInstances": ["masto.es", "mastodon.social"],
  "lookbackHours": 24
}

Auf Deutsch

Dieser Actor findet neue öffentliche Beiträge auf Bluesky und Mastodon, die Ihre Marke, Ihr Produkt oder Ihr Thema erwähnen. Stichwörter funktionieren mit und ohne Umlaute und Akzente: „Muller“ findet auch „Müller“. Mit dem Sprachfilter de erhalten Sie nur deutschsprachige Beiträge; für Mastodon können Sie deutschsprachige Server wie social.tchncs.de oder norden.social ergänzen. Mit „Only new mentions“ liefert ein geplanter Lauf nur Beiträge, die seit dem letzten Lauf neu sind. Sie brauchen kein Konto und keinen API-Schlüssel; Beiträge von Personen, die der Suche widersprochen haben, werden übersprungen.

{
  "keywords": ["Ihre Marke", "Muller"],
  "languages": ["de"],
  "mastodonInstances": ["social.tchncs.de", "norden.social", "mastodon.social"],
  "lookbackHours": 24,
  "onlyNew": true
}

Related Actors by the same developer

• Journalist Request Monitor: journalist source requests (#journorequest), calls for pitches and podcast guest requests from Bluesky and Mastodon.